The national profile of San Diego’s professional theater scene is rightfully a source of local pride. And yet it can overshadow the fact that there are other fertile stage communities here, too.

Prominent among them: the programs at San Diego County’s dozen-plus colleges and universities.

The pro and higher-ed theater realms, of course, don’t exist in separate, sealed-off universes. In fact, there’s plenty of symbiosis between them, and the two best-known college programs here happen to be paired with San Diego’s biggest theaters.

The University of California San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance, which offers degrees in a range of stage disciplines and whose MFA program is regularly rated among the top three in the country, shares space and artists with La Jolla Playhouse.

The University of San Diego, whose MFA program in acting is among the most selective in the country, runs that program jointly with the Old Globe Theatre.

Beyond those two, though, are programs with a huge diversity of aims, resources and histories.

Recent visits to a pair of separate projects in development at local universities helped illustrate that diversity.

One was a brand-new play being workshopped by a Tony Award-winning actor and a group of seasoned MFA students. The other was an existing, politically charged piece that is new to most of the undergrads working on it — many of whom are theater newcomers.

What they have in common is a sense of the energy and cross-fertilization that characterizes much of college theater here.

At San Diego State University on a recent Saturday evening, BD Wong was leading an ensemble of graduate students in a staged reading of the musical “Mr. Doctor.”

Wong, a stage and screen star who won a Tony in 1988 for his Broadway performance in David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly,” co-wrote the piece with the Tony-nominated composer Wayne Barker.

It’s an inventive show-within-a-show inspired by the true story of a group of Jewish children who performed the Bengali play “The Post Office” as the Nazi menace loomed in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Wong recently began a stint as artist in residence at La Jolla Playhouse; the idea of presenting a reading of “Mr. Doctor” at SDSU as part of that residency developed through meetings between university and Playhouse reps.

It so happens that SDSU’s rising MFA program in musical theater is one of only two such programs in the country. Its music director, Robert Meffe, and his wife, Sharon Wheatley, both were part of the reading — he as musical director and accompanist, she as performer. (Both are Broadway veterans.)

“It certainly turned out to be a great asset,” Wong said of the SDSU partnership after the performance, which attracted a near-capacity audience to SDSU’s Experimental Theatre. “(The students are) so excited, they’re so great with each other, and they really have each other’s backs. It’s very moving.

“It’s tricky when you have a new musical and you say you want to workshop it at X place,” Wong added. “You’re kind of stuck with what you get, and a lot of writing teams know that’s part of the process. You say, no, it’s OK, you just get the actors to inhabit the material — they don’t have to be super-right for the parts.

“I just lucked out in this case that everybody was right for a part; they fit (them) like a glove, as far as I’m concerned.”

Courtney Kettengell, one of the performers, said that even for most of these relatively seasoned students, working on an evolving piece with such a prominent artist was fresh territory.

“Having your hand in it — that’s very new,” she said during a post-performance Q-and-A with the audience. “I think a lot of us haven’t experienced that. We do plays that are already published, and you can’t change lines.

“But also — I got to work with BD Wong! He’s one of the most humble, intelligent men I have ever met. It really is so amazing to work with someone who’s not afraid to say, OK, that’s not working. But he’s also brilliant, so he’ll find something that does work.”

Fellow student Jacob Brent has his own Broadway résumé: He spent eight years in the New York production of “Cats” (as well as a stint in the London production), before heading to SDSU with the aim of becoming a theater educator.

“When I chose to come here, this is one of the things I envisioned would be part of my grad-school education: to get to work with someone like BD, and have an opportunity like this to perform new work and workshop new things,” Brent said.

“It was a little daunting the first day, just because of who he is. But we quickly all kind of got over that and got down to work. Which is really what you want to do in theater. The play’s the thing — we say that in the show. We just had to get over that and say, OK, get to it.”

For some of Kaja Amado Dunn’s students at California State University San Marcos, the play is the thing they’ve never really done before. And it’s been an eye-opening experience.

Dunn, an accomplished San Diego actress-director, is staging a campus production of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.” It’s a collection of monologues drawn from real-life voices commenting on the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent ’92 L.A. riots.

Dunn notes that the university’s racially and economically diverse population “lends itself to doing things beyond the traditional scope. (And) a lot of the kids had never done theater until they got here. So it feels like a treasure hunt — like, ‘That kid’s really talented!’ ”

On a break from a recent evening rehearsal, during which most of the students took on characters very different from themselves, they gathered in a circle to chat about their experiences. Many commented on how Smith’s play seemed to dovetail almost eerily with the recent protests over killings by police in Missouri and New York.

“I think there are benefits to doing classic (shows) in the theater repertoire forever,” said Laurissa Rudgers. “And there are going to be people who don’t know those stories in the years to come. But I think shows like this that really have a message and kind of force people to talk about things that are (crucial) issues."

Rudgers laughs as she notes that “We’ve gotten the whole thing of, ‘Oh, is that the stage version of ‘Twilight’ with the vampires?’

“They come not knowing what it’s about, and then get smacked in the face. They go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about this. I’m going to go look at this.’ ”

And Olivia Battle says that while she loves many types of stage work, she finds that “theater for social change (offers) a greater sense of purpose — that I’m doing something that’s going to create waves. Even if they’re only little ripples, there’s something that’s going to happen from that.”

For Dunn, there’s also the simple pleasure of seeing her students’ blossoming confidence: “They come in here and they discover they’re good. And getting to go on that journey together is so fulfilling.”

Students onstage

A roundup of current and upcoming theater productions at San Diego-area colleges and universities: